Personalization and issuance of identity documents, such as national ID cards, drivers licenses, passports and the like must be done in a highly secure manner in order to ensure the integrity and distribution of the issued identity documents. The security concerns surrounding the issuance of these types of identity documents includes the prevention of document forgeries and duplications, issuance of a document to a person other than for whom the document was created, and issuance to unauthorized persons such as criminals.
To ensure the integrity of identity documents, such documents have typically been personalized and issued by a central issuing agency or location, such as a local or federal governmental authority. These documents are often sent to the intended recipient through the mail. However, mail systems throughout the world often times cannot be sufficiently relied upon. In addition, documents can be stolen from the mail prior to reaching the intended recipients.
As an alternative to mail, the issuing agency may require the intended document recipient to appear personally at the issuing agency to personally retrieve the issued document. This can often times be inconvenient for the recipient who may be located far away from the site of the issuing agency. There are also instances when a person needs a replacement identity document such as when the previous identity document is lost, stolen and/or damaged. It can also be inconvenient for a person to go to the issuing agency to obtain a replacement.
De-centralized personalization and issuance of identity documents would resolve these problems and others. However, de-centralized personalization and issuance must be done in a manner to ensure the integrity and distribution of the issued identity document.
A previous attempt at de-centralized issuance of personalized financial cards is disclosed in WO 92/17856. As described therein, financial cards that contain user specific information are issued at a remote, unattended location directly to the user at an ATM-like machine.
There is, however, a continuing need for de-centralized personalization and issuance of identity documents.